Boy those industrious Finish researchers don't dick around, do they? But I find their academic lingo a bit turgid, tho...perhaps clearer prose might straighten-out their conclusions, thus expanding our further understanding of the import of their research by use of harder, more definitive language--as opposed to the rather flaccid descriptions they currently employ..

Left unsaid are analysis of the non-optimal cases: at the rightmost extreme the market is distorted by an oversupply condition that stretches the consumers' capacity, leaving it torporus and unable to respond to the supplier that falls within the standard interval. On the other hand, the undersupply problem leaves the consumptive capacity of the market unsatisfied, with flaccid suppliers unable to cope with unmet opportunities.

Robert--IIRC the accepted standard is significance at the .05 level (I buthered that in my previous post)

I think the a p=.05 is greater than a p=.01 But thats just my take

When a researcher undertakes a statistical study it is imperative to demonstrate why the underlying are worth studying and might suggest causality.. We can always correlate one variable against another--absent the literature suggesting why the relationship is important, the study is an exercise in statistics rather than a more rigorous study.

Alan S, your joke reminded me of a warning attached to new pair of binoculars I purchased a few years back. And, this is not a joke, the warning: DO NOT USE TO LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN. Thank you, attorneys.

The trick is to make the penis correlate in size to that of the male ego.. Researchers have found that for every $100,000 of disposable income the penis grows on average .7 inches. Purchase of an expensive car is an accelerant to that growth. In order to achieve optimum penile size men will generally work overtime and develop proficiency in boring skills. On a macro level this leads to a more productive enconomy....It should be noted that penile growth does not happen in a vacuum. The presence of desirable women is a stimulus to penile growth. Too many obese women acts as a disincentive to penile growth. It has been found that communities with too many fat women are economically retarded.

Their regressions have an R^2 value of 0.2, which is consistent with the article saying that it explains "15%" of the variation.

A correlation this low isn't statistically significant. Two variables taken at random are likely to show a correlation this high: the conventional wisdom is, "the whole world correlates at 0.3".

Freshman physics students will often fit their data and report the R^2 value as evidence they did it right, but you can fit a line to a plot of a quadratic and get over 0.95. These numbers have to be interpreted carefully.

ndspinelli - I am a bit of an amateur astronomer. It's obvious to people (one should hope) that you should not use a telescope or binoculars to look directly into the sun.

However, what's not so obvious, and is something that the manufacturers have to legitimately warn people about, is that pointing them at the sun (to use them like you'd use a magnifying glass to burn holes in paper or blow up ants) will very likely damage the instrument to a very expensive extent.

@GabrielH: Just for the record--'cause if this blog is about anything, it's about mathematical precision--in a bivariate linear regression an R^2 of 0.2 corresponds to a simple correlation of about 0.45 if an intercept term is included.

Thanks, RonF. However, the warning was a safety one so it meant not to look into the sun. Probably, some nose breather did, burned his retina, got a shyster and sued. Thusly the warning. I use binocs a lot and I ruined a good pair just having them exposed to the sun/heat.

For obvious reasons the male organ narrative yields little in terms of feasible policy recommendations.Beyond mass [im]migration, not much can be doneon the average size of male organ at the population level. Still, one practical and serious implication stands out. Namely, these findings spell trouble for countries with large male organs since they evidence both low levels and growth rates of GDPs.

...

It clearly seems that the `private sector' deserves more credit for economic development than is typically acknowledged.

I see Pogo beat me to it.

I, too, wondered if this wasn't another one of those pieces done by the likes of Alan Sokal.

There is a video on youtube of Miss America candidates answering a question about whether math should be taught in schools. It was discovered by a discussion list which has science and medicine educated people on it and the comments are hilarious in that they could not see it was a parody, because they so believe the stereotype of stoopid-beauty queen-Christian-hick that it had to be true.

This penis piece -- or at least the way it was written up jangled my alarm bells also. (? Who proposed the idea? On what basis? Who measured? Who paid? And WHY??)

SJL said... reminds of the gas station warning - "do not siphon by mouth".

I buy 5 gallons of gas at a time, and then siphon those containers to put gas into my tractors. You know what? Since the introduction of ethanol, gas isn't as bad as it once was. Way back when, when you could buy regular gas. Getting any in your mouth meant hours of a bad gas taste. Now, within 2, 3 minutes you can't taste a thing.

I'm probably the only commenter on this blog that still siphons gas. Am I right?

"The GDP-maximizing length can be identi ed at around13.5 centimetres. One striking result is the collapse in GDP after male organexceeds the length of 16 centimetres."

The article goes on to say that Koreans have a dick size of just under 9 centimeters on average whereas the Congolese have 18 centimeter dicks.

So this is basically a polite way of saying that smart industrious little dicked Asians naturally are more prosperous than dumb, lazy, oversexed big dicked niggahss - on average.

Thus by making the distinction a penile one...the Finns avoid the PC repercussions on them of one race being smarter than another, one race harder working than another.

Left unanalyzed are why Jews with bigger dicks on average than Japs are more wealthy...or their co-Semite Palestinian 'cousins'.Or why big-dick Dutchman are more prosperous than smaller average dick length Irish...

I had a nice squeeze bulb siphon with a vaccum breaker valve on the top, but it went kaput 10 years ago. Purchased something else, but it didn't work. So I'm back doing it the old fashioned way. My original pump came with the kerosine heater that I purchased from a friend.

Okay. I checked the original paper. The spoof part is probably that it got published at all.

So they did a regression analysis. Yip. Yip. Yip. Yahoo! More to the point, their R-squared was 15% ("explain over 15% of the ... variation in 1985 GDP"), which is pitiful, and suggests a correlation coefficient of about 0.39, which back in my geo-chemistry days we'd regard as pretty well insignificant.

They had bupkis, but got it published as a joke, to wit the obvious puns.

@ AllenS I'm probably the only commenter on this blog that still siphons gas. Am I right?

This commenter's husband (who think this commenter might be nuts for all the time spent on Althouse) has been known to siphon gas. ;-)

The most notable occurrence when he accidentally (because he was being a jerk) put some diesel in my gas fueled car a number of years ago. Sigh. That was a bit labor intensive, but turned out okay in the end.

You might want to be careful about that stupid ethanol gas -- the 10% mixture -- it is wreaking havoc on the older auto gas engines, trimmers, lawnmowers etc. (The 15% mix car manufacturers are writing out of their warranties on many cars.)

Check our favorite mag, Popular Mechanics.

Hubby has been putting aviation fuel in our lawnmower. A bit pricey so I wonder whether it is worth it .... Tractor is off road diesel, so not sure what the sulphur deal is there.

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I makes sense that the USA would be essentially average, considering it has far less of a common genetic background than other nations that might cause it to skew towards either end of the spectrum. Other nations represented here are more “closed” systems that would allow for such a phenomenon to occur over hundreds or even thousands of years. The USA, on the other hand, is a mixture of many countries.